From the things that make me happy department. Years ago our help documentation source was parsed with a bunch of java tools. At the time gcj was the only possibility for us in RHEL/Fedora and the build time for all localized langpacks that we included was about 26 hours in our build system.

Which was a bit depressing.

So I rewrote it in c++, taking super care to keep the same JavaHelp-derived format and so forth. Which brought build times down to about 10 hours.

Which made me happy.

At some stage though, then it was decided to then index our help with lucene, which brought back java as a build-time and run-time dependency for building help and searching it at run-time.

Which made me sad again, though openjdk was the default for us at this stage, so it wasn’t as much of a pain, though that’s why you have that perceptual lag when you first search for a term in help.

But now, for LibreOffice 3.6, Gert van Valkenhoef has ported our lucene code to clucene. helpcontent builds faster, and there’s no lag on searching for something in help.